


I Know Your Kind

by scioscribe



Category: Thoroughbreds (2017)
Genre: Dark, F/F, F/M, Future Fic, Murder, Past Relationship(s), Post-Canon, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-08-19 11:44:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16533983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Lily has a stepdaughter now, and she knows the gleam in the girl's eyes.





	I Know Your Kind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Liviania](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liviania/gifts).



Lily got postcards from her sometimes.

They were usually from places where Lily wouldn’t think anyone would bother to advertise that they’d been there—Cincinnati, Staten Island, Tampa.  Gaudy pictures of Busch Gardens and dirt-dull pictures of the Ohio River.  Sometimes, their source would be less obvious—vintage book covers and trite little Monets—and usually on those the postmarks would be local.  Once there was no stamp at all: Amanda had slipped it into Lily’s mailbox herself.  Lily had stroked her thumb across it restlessly, imagining the paper still warm from Amanda’s hand with its short, unpainted nails.

Amanda never signed her name, which felt like a concession, a Valentine.  Plausible deniability, after all, was always much more Lily’s style than hers.

If anyone ever asked her if they were in contact, she would be able, with polished sincerity, to say no.  Of course not.  _I haven’t seen Amanda in twenty years._

Lily was better with sincerity than she was with honesty.  Honesty was a matter of fact, sincerity a matter of technique.

The postcards weren’t threatening, just blandly, enticingly strange.  They didn’t have the flavor of anything else in Lily’s life, these dispatches from Amanda-land:

_I’ve been going into stores down here without shoes.  You can get away with that even if they have those no shoes-no shirt-no service signs, you just have to have confidence.  Walk like you have shoes on.  All of it means my feet have been getting these thick calluses and they always look sort of dirty from the grime of floors that aren’t as clean as the managers would like you to think.  Maybe eventually my feet will get so dark with dirt that it’ll look like I’m wearing shoes even if people pay attention._

_I’ve been thinking about it and I don’t know why cuckoo clocks were ever invented.  Would you rather have one of those singing fish on your walls or a cuckoo clock?  I mean, either way it’s kitsch, but I think the fish is more honest about it._

Lily kept them all.  You could throw away a postcard without reading it, but it was harder than it was with a letter.  She couldn’t get herself from slowly flipping it over—a motion like turning a doorknob—and seeing what was written on the other side.  And once she had read them, she couldn’t let them go.  Amanda’s words became part of her, like dirt rubbed into her skin.

Sometimes she wanted to write back.  She saw the words on the insides of her eyelids whenever she couldn’t sleep.

If she wrote back, she would say, _I always think of you when I watch old movies._

_I made myself cry at Mark’s funeral.  It’s funny how even my mom believed I meant it.  She knew the two of us hated each other, but she still thought I broke down sobbing at his grave.  Like I was going to throw myself in on top of his coffin and scream for him not to go.  She didn’t know me at all._

She’d say, on her own very own postcard, custom-made with a photo of her sprawling, obtrusively modern house, _Wish you were here._

_On a Christmas card: Amanda, I think my stepdaughter wants to kill me._

*

She’d married Isaac because he looked, on paper and in person, like the husband she should have.  He was tall and good-looking in a generic kind of way—he could have modeled for some lesser-known cologne.  He was rich in a generic kind of way, too.  He was nice and considerate even though his idea of romance never went beyond a dozen red roses, good in bed even though his style was rote and by-the-numbers.  She knew everything about him from the moment they met: where he would want to go on vacation (wherever his boss had been the year before), what kind of dresses he would like on her (low-cut and backless but not too short), what tame little hobbies he would have (golf and biographies of political figures), what he would say when it was raining (“Cats and dogs out there!”), what position he would lie in when he slept (on his side and so close to her his breath was a hot mist against her cheek).  Lily wanted certain things—prizes, assets.  To get them, her life had to run on oiled tracks.  People could be unpredictable; passion could be disruptive.  Isaac provided her not with sparks but with insulation.

His daughter Kira was the only surprise.

“She takes after her mother,” Isaac had told Lily apologetically, when Kira spent their first getting-to-know-you brunch icily ignoring her.  “The divorce has been hard on her.”

Lily applied a smile to her mouth like a fresh coat of lipstick.  “It’s fine.  I understand completely—I remember when my mom first started dating again after my dad’s death.  It was a rough time.”  She took a long drink of her mimosa, letting her engagement ring clink against the stem of the champagne flute.  “Of course, obviously that was a more serious situation.  I’m sure Kira will come around sooner than I did.”

Kira didn’t.

Isaac wasn’t the type to strongarm his daughter into even the frostiest, most obligatory politeness.  He spouted all kinds of bullshit about adolescent developmental space and freedom from compulsion, shallow pulled-off-Google headlines about what kids needed.  To listen to him, you’d think he was Father of the Year for never saying no, never saying stop.

It was a fly in the ointment.  She was willing to tolerate it.

Two weeks before their wedding, Lily was coming back from the cellar with a bottle of wine for the table when she ran into Kira headed to the back den.  She and her friends had made that their little sanctuary, spoiling all the furniture with the skunk scent of weed and the grainy stickiness of badly cleaned-up stains.  Isaac was characteristically indulgent about it—“Let them have their privacy,” he always said, “so long as they don’t get into any trouble”—but Lily hated even knowing they were back there, this little nest of sloe-eyed teenagers with their stupidity and condescension.

Lily stopped there in the hallway.  The bottleneck was smooth in her hand, the bottle heavy.  She smiled.  _I could crack this over your head right now._

It was Kira who forced the confrontation, though.  “It’s really creepy when you smile like that.”

“Is it?”

“And when you ask questions that way.  Making someone say again what they just said already.”

“Well, aren’t you just the little linguistic genius,” Lily said coolly.

She saw Kira’s eyes widen at that—the little bitch thought she should be able to say whatever she wanted and her stepmother-to-be would just suck it up and keep on handling her with kid gloves—and Lily took advantage of her disorientation and stepped forward, closer to her.  She could smell Kira’s watermelon body spray.  That was the kind of bullshit she and her friends got up to, pretending to be above fashion by buying these dollar-store fragrances and these Wal-Mart blazers while they still lived in the lap of luxury.

“You don’t like me,” Lily said, staying close to her, smelling that awful sticky-sweetness.  “And that’s fine.  I don’t like you either, Kira.  But here’s the thing—I’m going to marry your father.  I don’t think you’ve really accepted what that means.  I won’t just be sleeping in his bed, living in his house, raising his daughter.  It’ll be my bed, my house.  And you.  So you should work on improving that attitude of yours, because soon, you’re going to be under _my_ roof, not just your butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-mouth daddy’s.”

“I could live with my mom.”

“Sure.  When she gets out of rehab.”  She kept on smiling.  Her lips felt like they were lacquered in place.  “You know, Isaac always says you’re so much like her.  You should probably be careful about all that shit you smoke and drink in our den, if that’s the case.  Things like that can run in the family.”

Kira’s eyes were circles now, swimmy with tears.  She looked like a doll, one of those ones you could shake hard until they started crying.  “You can’t talk to me that way.  I’m going to tell Dad you said that.”

“Knock yourself out,” Lily said.  “He’s not going to believe you.”

The weight of the bottle in her hand was like the weight of the knife, all those years ago.

She said, “If we stay out of each other’s way, we can both get what we want.”

“You don’t even love him, do you?”

Lily tilted her head, considering it.  “I don’t know.”  She shrugged.  “That’s not really relevant, though, is it?”

Kira didn’t make any scenes after that.  She avoided Lily as much as possible.

“I understand,” Lily would say whenever Isaac expressed any regret about this.  “She’s at a difficult age.  It’s fine, really.”  She would cross her legs beneath the dinner table, feeling the glide of smooth skin on smooth skin, more aroused by her own body, by her own achievements, than by anything Isaac ever did to her.  “It’s not weird unless you make it weird.  A friend of mine used to say that.”

She thought she saw Amanda at the wedding.  Standing in the back, dressed in pale gray.  Like a moth, like a ghost, like the bad fairy at the princess’s christening.

Three months after that, Lily felt a small, quick hand against her back when she was walking down the stairs.

It was a stupid thing for Kira to have even tried.  One single flight of stairs, partly carpeted—did Kira even think about what the odds were of her dying from that?  Lily dealt with the broken arm, set with a steel pin, and pretended she hadn’t felt Kira push or heard Kira dart off afterwards, needing to be in her bedroom so she could come out later in complete surprise— _Oh my God, Lily, are you okay?  What happened?_

Lily had just sat there at the foot of the stairs, leaning against the wall, her broken arm laid out across her lap like a purse she was carrying.  Blood slicked her mouth from where the fall had busted her lip open.  She smiled the smile Kira hated and felt Kira draw back from her.

“You should drive me to the hospital,” Lily said pleasantly.  “I don’t think it’s bad enough to call for an ambulance.”

Kira stood there staring down at her, her face cheesy-white: she was so weak, Lily thought, so young, to have tried this without any game plan for what would happen afterwards.  Lily had thought of nothing but what would happen after Mark.  She had planned her whole life up until this moment, this moment of blood and broken bone and repetition from the other side.  This, she had to admit, was unexpected.

But she would win.

“You just tripped?” Kira said uncertainly.  “That’s what happened, right?”

Like Lily was going to drag anyone else into this by telling the ER doctors that her stepdaughter had pushed her down the stairs, by telling them that she knew for sure, that she recognized the gleam in Kira’s eyes because it had once been the gleam in her own.

“Just a silly accident,” Lily said.

 _Amanda_ , Lily was tempted to write, _this time I’m going to have to be more careful.  I have to do everything myself now._

_Ever since you, I haven’t had anyone I could really rely on._

*

In the end, she used the painkillers she got for her broken arm.  That felt only fair.  She crushed them up and dissolved them into Kira’s acai berry lemonade; a few more, also crushed, made a line on the table of the den with an index card to one side of it.  She left the prescription bottle there, curling Kira’s limp fingers around it first.

Kira had been spending that evening alone.  All Lily had had to do was wait for her to slip out of the den to go to the bathroom, and then wait again for her to be gone for good so she could do what needed to be done.  A few hours later, she complained of her arm hurting her and Isaac, thoughtful as ever, went to go get her medicine for her.

Of course, he couldn’t find it.

It was all a non-issue, really.  The den reeked of pot and spilled beer and the police found traces of other drugs there as well.  Kira even had a little coke rocketing around in her bloodstream—bonus, Lily thought.  It had been nice of her to put in that last selling detail.

Isaac was humiliated—all his hands-off parenting had resulted in a daughter as fatalistic and addiction-prone as her mother.  The cops questioned him carefully about what exactly he knew, or should have known, about what was going on in his house.  The questions weren’t the same for her.  She was the new stepmother of a teenage daughter who had been prickly and difficult—such a difficult age.

No one expected her to have known what Kira was doing.  No one expected her to have taken care of her.

Still, she cried all through her questioning, she cried with Isaac, and she cried at the funeral.  She shone with sincerity.

She couldn’t run for office now, she supposed.  Two deaths in the family—someone would throw mud around and it just wasn’t worth the risk.  But you could make any amount of money with skeletons in your closet.  Wasn’t that the new American Dream?

She saw Amanda again at the funeral.  Same gray dress, for death or celebration.

This time, Lily went right up to her.  “You cut your hair,” she said.

“A little,” Amanda said, shrugging.  “Once I got it short enough that it didn’t tickle the back of neck, I realized how much I hated having the back of my neck tickled.”

“So wear a ponytail.”

“No, I like this better.  Plus, it sends off the right signal.  That emotionally disaffected lesbian vibe.”

Lily had only ever kissed her once, right when Amanda had started stirring, waking up from the drugged orange juice.  They had both been covered in blood, but not on their lips.  Amanda had tasted like no-flavor chapstick and oranges and stale breath.  She’d been half-unconscious.  Even so, Lily had never had a better kiss, never one where she’d been understood so well, never one where she had wanted so much and known she was going to get it.

Life without Amanda had been as smooth and glossy as a magazine spread.  Nothing had been ugly or hard or honest.

“I like the postcards,” Lily said, changing the subject.  “You should put a return address on them sometime.”

“You never wrote me back before.”

“People change,” Lily said.

Amanda raised her eyebrows.  “Under the circumstances, that’s kind of ironic, don’t you think?”  She didn’t wait for an answer.  “I like knowing where to find you when you don’t know where to find me.  If you really wanted to know, you could hire a private investigator, you’ve got the money for it.  I’m not going to go out of my way to tell you.  You’re not exactly a safe person to know.  That’s not a value judgment, just the truth.”  She nodded in Isaac’s direction.  “He seems nice.  A little too dumb to figure things out, but nice.  If that’s what you want.”

“Why would I have anything I don’t want?” Lily said.


End file.
